Official Luthiers Forum!

Grant..thanks for the description of flintknapping, it is fascinating. I think alot of the retails in guitar building as far as refining the sound is all about balancing the physical forces that contribute to sound and tone so the flintknapping analogy does make sense.

Have you read some of the archived discussions about Chaldni "glitter" pattern of tops, particularly Alan Carruths desciption of the process? It would be interesting to see what the resonance pattern of a top braced the way that you do would be.

OK, thanks Grant. And, I think I'm following you. So, these curved braces are an attempt at replicating those ridges in a given stone... right? And the force of your flintknapping blows follows those ridges more efficiently...right? And then the force travels out laterally. Right.
Ok, so I guess you're thinking of sound waves moving out laterally from those curved braces...right?

I'll still try to digest that for a while.

So how about this in your scenario: what about the growth rings--the harder grain lines of early wood (or is it late...I have a hard time remembering!)--being those ridges along which the energy flows? I'm rambling here, and I appologize, but the thought of how the sound travels through a top is fascinating.

SK

_________________
From Nacogdoches...the oldest town in Texas.

http://www.stephenkinnaird.com

[QUOTE=CarltonM] Grant...I'd like to see your chair, too. Anything that makes a guitar or guitarist play or live better is appropriate here!

[QUOTE=Shane Neifer] Steve ya mean your subscription costs to Bob's zoot don't ya?[/QUOTE]

Shane...Great idea!!! A "Zoot-of-the-Month" club! We just send Bob all our money each month, and he sends us some primo wood. Brilliant! [/QUOTE]

Some sort of a zoot-tax?

Gg

[QUOTE=Shane Neifer] Steve ya mean your subscription costs to Bob's zoot don't ya?

Shane [/QUOTE]

Shane, you're going to get me in trouble yet.

Steve

_________________
From Nacogdoches...the oldest town in Texas.

http://www.stephenkinnaird.com

Grant
I just joined and this is my first post but your bracing is gorgeous!! How wuld you describe the sound of your guitars compared to more traditional X bracing. My own guitars are X braced and run more towards a traditional layout.

How about a "Zootificate" This way when your wife or gilfriend doesn't know what to buy for your birthday, father's day etc. Just tell her "Get me a "Zootificate from the Zootman"

_________________
Beautiful and unusual tone woods at a reasonable price.
http://www.rctonewoods.com/RCT_Store
The Zootman
1109 Military Rd.
Kenmore, NY 14217
(716) 874-1498

Well, at least there is the occasional post that has something to do with the topic (and I thought some of the other forums were bad this way)

Grant

Grant, I'm fascinated by your bracing, but being at the very beginning of this
journey, I feel I don't know enough to ask worthwhile question about so
deep a subject; but I would love to know: what caused you to move away
from 'traditional' bracing, and what drew you in the direction you're now
exploring with your designs?

Glad you've joined the forum, and Happy New Year!!

[QUOTE=chmood] Grant, I'm fascinated by your bracing, but being at the very beginning of this
journey, I feel I don't know enough to ask worthwhile question about so
deep a subject; but I would love to know: what caused you to move away
from 'traditional' bracing, and what drew you in the direction you're now
exploring with your designs?

Glad you've joined the forum, and Happy New Year!![/QUOTE]

Well this all started several years back chatting with one of my wood customers. He was looking for a sound in a guitar that he had not been able to find since one from several decades ago when he was doing ski lodge gigs in new England. He described what he was trying to find and felt that maybe some different sort of top bracing scheme might do it. He asked if I could design something and I agreed to give it a try. After much thought and several skecthes, I put something together. After the first round of modifications, I felt it was on the right track so I drew it up and mailed it off to him. Lost track of him for a couple of years, but finally got back in touch last year and he said the design was fantastic, by his thoughts and he was very happy. In the meantime, I have continued to make minor adjustments to get to the present form. Mow, this don't sound like no Martin but that was not our objective.

Thanks for asking and the best to you.

Grant

What was it he was after? And how does your approach achieve it?
And how is the sound different from a Martin? Is there anything it IS like?

If you don't mind me asking...

[QUOTE=chmood] What was it he was after? And how does your approach achieve it?
And how is the sound different from a Martin? Is there anything it IS like?

If you don't mind me asking...[/QUOTE]

He was looking for a fuller bass response. Not boomy and overpowering, but more balanced to his ear. Actually this bracing pattern seems to boost up the whole range, not just the bass, and it seems cleaner and has a quick response.

Guess I really don't know what to compare it to. I was at a Garnet Rogers concert Garnet's web page last Fall and he played around for about a half hour before the show with my prototype adjustable neck guitar which has the most recent itteration of this bracing (this one has an OM body size with a cutaway). He felt it most compared to his Nick Lucas Special. And, he too said "it is definitely not a Martin" (he is not a Martin fan). What surprised him most was that it was just a year and a half old. He thought it sounded like it had been played for 7 or 8 years. That is about all I can say at this point.

Grant

Allow me to "chime in." I'm not much of a player (I oughta be, after 30 years, but I just aint), but I have plucked a few notes and strummed a tiny bit on 3 of Grant's guitars, so I'll give you my observations.

Whenever I get the opportunity (usually at better music stores), I try to play high-end guitars, to try to gain an understanding of the range of what one might expect an expensive, hand built guitar to sound like. Again, I'm far from being an expert, but I have had the pleasure of playing a few very nice guitars.

My impression of Grant's guitars, in the brief moments that I played them, was that they were outrageously "alive", "forward", "punchy", and "loud". I did not play long enough or use enough of the neck to swear by the overall balance of tone, but I will do that the next chance I get. (One problem for me is that I have been playing in DADGAD almost exclusively for a few years, and I didn't take the time to tune to DADGAD to make a full assessment. I was actually at Grant's shop to ask for his help in assessing my own far-flung bracing/bridging scheme and related lutherie topics, and did not really take the happy side trip to the player's bench.)

I can say with a degree of certainty that most of you would quickly agree that there is not too much mass in the braces, or anything else holding back the tops from delivering a BIG sound presence. Again, I didn't play all up and down the neck, but from what I heard (in standard tuning), there was nothing muddy about the bass and the mids and trebles rang out clearly. Plenty of sustain too.

One of the 3 guitars had Bocote back and sides. It was gorgeous (I've always liked that wood and even have a coffee table made from it.) Quite frankly, in my opinion, when I tap a piece of Rosewood or Granadillo, the woods sings ***pinggggggg***, and when I tap a piece of Bocote is goes *thud. So, when Grant handed me his Bocote guitar, I wasn't expecting much. Wrong! If ever I had proof that the top of a guitar produces the vast majority of the overall sound, this was it!

So, was it the tops? (All 3 had White Spruce tops, and man-oh-man is that stuff ever stiff!)

Was it the bracing pattern? Or Grant's deft carving skills being applied to brace geometry?

I dunno. But as I mentioned elsewhere, after all of the guitars I have played, and with a deep and reverent nod to all of the great sounding variants of Martin's X bracing, I plan to copy Grant's bracing pattern unless my own bracing/bridge scheme proves to be a worthy contender.

Dennis

_________________
Dennis Leahy
Duluth, MN, USA
7th Sense Multimedia

Nice chair, Grant. Please post photos of the guitar, too!

All seriousness aside (as Steve Allen used to say), I have a bracing design
that is almost exactly like that, from the soundhole up.

That is a right-handed guitar, correct? At first I thought you were Kasha
inspired, but the treble and bass sides are kind of opposite of Kasha. The
Anti-Kasha, so to speak. What does the bridge look like? Also anti-
Kasha?

If the right note is played, will the top split along the curved brace like a
piece of flint?

I don't know you yet, so thanks for your patience with my kidding. I love
to see new ideas. Lots of people are doing Martin very well already
(including Martin). How is white spruce in weight compared with other
spruces, typically? Do you know the typical ratio of long grain to cross
grain stiffness?

_________________
Howard Klepper
http://www.klepperguitars.com

When all else fails, clean the shop.

Where do you get your white spruce? I live in a predominantly white spruce forest(have a pair of large ones in the back yard, actually), and it isn't all that much different than the other spruces. Botanically, it is pretty well identical to Engelmann and Blue, isn't it?

All the white spruce I've handled is lighter in weight, and less stiff, than red and black spruce, our other local spruce.

I can say with a degree of certainty that most of you would quickly agree that there is not too much mass in the braces

Well, they look pretty hefty to my eyes. But what's more important than mass, is where the mass is, and how loose a top remains. With the offset brace pattern, Grant's created a strong artificial node on one side of the top, while leaving the other quite free, resulting in a top that will move in a side-to-side rocking motion more than a typical top would move. Very similar to how a soundpost works on a violin-family instrument, but without coupling with the back
I've done a lot of work on mandolins with this type of sustem, and it can work well, but I found it to be very finicky as to the location of the node. Anybody that's ever moved the soundpost around in a very responsive violin can attest that moving it one direction or the other, and as little as 1/16", can change the tone dramatically. Same here, only we don't have the luxury of easily moving the node(the soundpost creates and defines the artificial node in a violin's top), because the location of the braces is pretty well fixed. That said, a guitar, being much larger and forgiving, should be a lot easier to keep in the "happy" range....Mario38719.1193287037

Howard, The white spruce I am using is a bit less dense than any of the other spruce that I have (sitka, Engelmann). I have not actually tested the crossgrain stiffness, but from what I have been able to find it generally appears that the crossgrain to long grain stiffness should be somewhere in the neighborhood of about 50% greater than sitka. That seems about reasonable for most of the wood that I have compared to the examples of other species that I have.

Mario, Genetically, white spruce is as distinct as any of the other species. My white spruce is from right where I live, in central northern Minnesota. One thing that we do have here as opposed to most of the rest of the range of white spruce, is the lack of the possibility for hybridization, due to the lack of other spruce species. So we have the pure version, which may not be the case in other areas. The only other spruce we have is black, which sometimes crosses with white in the Canadian shield area where both species can be found in mixed stands on upland sites. In my area, black spruce is confined to swamps, and there are no records of the two crossing.

I think that the genetic purity and the extreme cold winters we have here may make Minnesota white spruce a totally different animal than that from other regions. All of the white spruce that I have worked with has come from 8 trees. None of these were large - they generally ranged from 20 to 24" in diameter. Minnesota has the largest white spruce in the US and it is only 40" in diameter.

Now, how this all relates to my bracing pattern, I do not really know. Allmost all of my experimentation, so far, has been with the white spruce tops.

Grant

and the extreme cold winters we have here

Cold is relative. I'm a couple hundred miles from the Hudson bay.... wanna talk cold? At this time last year, I'd seen -59f. Our record is -73f. If cold weather made for better spruce, you'd all be shopping up here...

Your White generally won't be any different than the white across the border. Trees don't have any respect for political borders <g> Not saying yours is bad, and indeed, you may have hit upon 8 great trees. Good for you! But the arguments of 'pure' vs hybridized begins to sound like a "mine VS yours deal". As you said earlier, lets be humble...

Mines a hybrid! Thats the cats pijamas these days isn't it! On ya that is just in cars...nuts! .

Seriously though. The coolest thing about wood is that you can't talk specifics. The range of structural and visual differences within a single species, heck within the same tree are just too great. As woodworkers we look for a specific set of criteria for the wood we use and no matter what we build we sift through a tonne (that's 2200 pounds, I am Canadian!) of wood to find the sticks we need for our projects. In tonewood, tops anyway, I spend the most of my time looking at trees and logs to get the very few I will use to process into tops. I bore green trees and have a good look at them before long before the saw comes out of the truck and even then, after turning away a LOT of other trees for these select few, some still aren't good enough for tonewood and they become something else.

I just like to say, that good spruce is good spruce. After that, it is all hype and marketing. I heard today that my fellow neighbour tonewood guy, the dude with the other forum, sold a set to a guy in Vancouver for $250. I have a few of those very same sets out in my shed, I know the problems with that wood, wonderful bearclaw, but all with runout. The tree had quite a twist. I don't think the runout is that big of a deal myself but I am just saying that if you fork out that kind of cash the top should be flawless! Marketing....I just like good wood. Call it what you want!

Shane

_________________
Canada

[QUOTE=Mario] and the extreme cold winters we have here

Cold is relative. I'm a couple hundred miles from the Hudson bay.... wanna talk cold? At this time last year, I'd seen -59f. Our record is -73f. If cold weather made for better spruce, you'd all be shopping up here...

Your White generally won't be any different than the white across the border. Trees don't have any respect for political borders <g> Not saying yours is bad, and indeed, you may have hit upon 8 great trees. Good for you! But the arguments of 'pure' vs hybridized begins to sound like a "mine VS yours deal". As you said earlier, lets be humble...
[/QUOTE]

Whoa, sorry geeze, didn't intend to get anybody bent out of shape.

No "mine vs yours" here. Just trying to answer questions as best as I can. I like the wood, I use it, and it works better for what I do than what else I have. That's it, no more no less. FWIW

And I am still humble

Grant

[QUOTE=Shane Neifer]
(...) it is all hype and marketing. I heard today that my fellow neighbour tonewood guy, the dude with the other forum, sold a set to a guy in Vancouver for $250. (...)
[/QUOTE]

Wow Shane... we've got to rise our prices ... or start selling rubbish haha

Hey, I'm kidding, please don't ship me $250 tops

On cold my opinion is that together with soil, light and water it plays an important role.
Gg

ggdelazzer38720.7423263889

[QUOTE=Mario] But the arguments of 'pure' vs hybridized begins to sound like a "mine VS yours deal". As you said earlier, lets be humble...
[/QUOTE]
Grant's a big boy, and can certainly defend himself, but Mario, I have to tell you it is kind of funny that you would mention this to Grant. Although I think you said you don't visit the "other" luthierforum, there are numerous examples where Grant argues that there is no ONE best wood for musical instrument (or guitar) soundboards. If you re-read, you'll see genetic purity and the extreme cold winters we have here may make Minnesota white spruce a totally different animal...

"totally different animal" sounds to me like a statement of comparison without an arrogant tone, and in fact does not have any claim of superiority - just different. And I read "genetic purity" as a statement of an interesting fact about a species in a geographic region, again not as a statement that hybrids are inferior.

If anyone was kinda bragging up White Spruce, it was me, not Grant. And that's because it *performed* very well to my ears, and the samples that I scratched and sniffed were very stiff (stiffer than any Sitka I've handled, stiffer than the few Lutzii boards that I've handled, and comparable to the stiffness of the one set of Italian Spruce I got from Luigi. And guess what - I LOVE the sound of Western Red Cedar! So, I would have to agree with statements that I have heard Grant make, that there is no ONE species of wood that makes the best guitar tops. Each species is different, and each board from each tree is different - so only some broad generalizations can be made. Stiffness is but a single factor among many. Throw in the myriad factors of what luthiers actually do with the wood (in terms of engineering and bracing), and it becomes obvious that there are more unknowns than knowns when it comes to tonewood.

Whew! Mario, I hope you don't think I'm attacking you. I'm not. I just hope you give Grant a chance. He's not at all an arrogant guy (though most people with his talent would tend to be.)

Dennis

_________________
Dennis Leahy
Duluth, MN, USA
7th Sense Multimedia